Steve Erickson - Zeroville

Vikar says, “Are you going to rob us now?”

“Uh.” The burglar stops his circling and ponders this. “Man, how much do you have on you? I’m not going to take your credit cards or anything like that.”

“I don’t have any credit cards.” Vikar takes out his cash. “A hundred and thirty-eight dollars.”

The burglar seems slightly anguished. “Maybe you could give me the thirty-eight? I’m pretty strapped, I—” He stops. “No, you know what? Fuck that. If you hadn’t let me go that night, my ass would have been on ice most of the last ten years.”

“Take the hundred,” Vikar says.

“No, son, can’t do it.” Vikar holds out the hundred; head raised, a slight tone of hurt in his voice, the burglar says, “You’re messing with my self-dignity now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, O.K.,” before Vikar can put the money away, “if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“For a freaky white man, you’re O.K.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t use the gun around kids anymore.”

“I’ll reexamine that policy,” the burglar agrees, although he doesn’t put the gun away. Rather he waves it goodbye to Vikar and Zazi before vanishing back into the shadows of the 405. “And kudos on that nomination, man.”

130.

Sometimes Vikar hears Zazi crying behind her closed bedroom door. He stands at the door ten, fifteen minutes, wondering what to do, before finally turning away.

129.

The panorama of the city below Vikar’s house is swallowed up by the inky cloud of his past, until there’s nothing left of the city that he came to more than ten years before. Shaken loose by a temporal tremor, the house drifts unmoored in the dark. Zazi comes and goes unpredictably; in her room she practices to records by the Doors, who never had a bass player and could have, she feels certain, used one.

128.

One afternoon Zazi says, “What’s this?” On the cork bulletin board next to the phone is tacked the original copy of the ancient writing from Vikar’s dream, as he copied it that night in Cannes.

“It’s nothing,” he says.

“It’s nothing?”

“No.”

She studies the writing. “What does it mean?”

“Nothing.”

“It means nothing?”

“No.”

“Who wrote it?”

“I did.”

“Well, then it must mean something.”

“No.”

“Well, where did it come from? It must have come from somewhere. It’s tacked to the board.” She takes it down to look at it more closely. “Didn’t you tack it here?”

He says, “Yes.” He puts out his hand. “Here.”

She doesn’t give it to him. “Well, you wrote it and you tacked it up.”

“Here.”

“So it must mean something. Is it Latin or Greek or something?”

“It’s from a dream.”

“From a dream? You dreamed this?”

“Here.”

“You dreamed this and wrote it down and tacked it up?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. Here,” and he snatches it from her hand violently enough to make her jump. He turns, stops for a moment but then continues down the stairs, wadding the paper in his hand.

127.

Hours later, Vikar comes upstairs to find Zazi sitting in the living room, watching television and smoking a cigarette. She says, “Do you mind if I watch this by myself?” He assumes she’s angry about earlier that day. “All right,” he says. Turning back, he sees A Place in the Sun on the TV.

126.

Now and then in the early morning when it’s still dark, Vikar wakes to the sound of Zazi’s guitar. The next morning when he gets up, she’s still sitting on the edge of her bed practicing. “Didn’t you sleep?” he says.

“You know what’s weird about that movie?” Zazi says.

“Which movie?”

“That Place in the Sun movie.”

“What?”

She sets the guitar aside and leans back against the wall. “The truth is, I’ve never liked movies much. I think maybe because of Mom, I just never wanted to have anything to do with them. I’m into music.”

“We don’t have to go to the movies.”

“No, I wanted to because, you know, the earliest memory I have as a kid?”

“Yes.”

“Guess.”

“The Houdini House in Laurel Canyon.”

“That house belonged to Houdini?”

“Yes.”

“Houdini the magician guy?”

“He wasn’t living there then.” Vikar says, “When you saw me there.”

“I can’t say it isn’t a bit hazy, but you were like a fantastical creature or something, from some story my Mom might have read to me. And I liked living there in the canyon with the Zappas and all those crazy people, though at the time, of course, I didn’t know they were crazy — they were nice to me. Whereas that movie crowd at the beach, they didn’t pay me any attention at all, which I didn’t mind so much, but still.” She shrugs. “So going to the movies with you is different. You know, like there’s a difference between a movie life and a Hollywood life, and the Hollywood life was what my Mom had, and the Hollywood ending that goes with it, I guess.”

“Montgomery Clift’s life had a Hollywood ending as well.”

“The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the point of movies — you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be different when you don’t watch it with anyone else. And that movie,” she says, “that’s one fucked-up—”

“Stop,” says Vikar.

“—movie, but not in a completely bad way. That’s a movie you see alone and it gets into you — I’ve been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There’s nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply fucked up, yeah—”

“Stop.”

“—but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know? I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater — what are they going to do with a movie like that? There’s too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it’s just you alone. It just seems … radical, any movie that, like, demands your privacy , because it’s, you know … a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point , and you’re one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can’t be naked like that with strangers, you can’t even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you’re finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs … so I just couldn’t sleep. That movie’s like a ghost. Watch it alone and you become the thing or person it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else’s. Not even yours, Vikar.” She says, “It may be the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. It may almost be as great as the X album or ‘Aerosol Burns’ or Germfree Adolescents .”

125.

Vikar says, “Once Cassavetes told me about seeing A Place in the Sun when it came out. He hated it so much that he went back and saw it the next day and then every day for a week, until he realized he loved it.”

“Who’s Cassavetes?”

“He is to movies what the Sound is to music.”

“Isn’t that weird when that happens?” says Zazi. “It’s like the first time I heard the second Pere Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit — and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn’t changed. The movie hasn’t changed. It’s still the same exact movie, but it’s like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn’t know you could understand, it’s like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off — but when you don’t, it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that’s been holding you down or back, because when you hear a really really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn’t before, everything looks different, like what they say when you’re in love or something — though I wouldn’t know — but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.”